The Burial at Thebes

(Paperback, Main)

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Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's new verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in western drama. The Burial at Thebes honours explores the dangers of pride and absolute belief regardless of personal, political and moral consequences. The opposed and irreconcilable voices of family and the state enact an ancient but perennial conflict, where the morality of private allegiance is pitched against that of public service.

Author Bio

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the country, on a farm, in touch with a traditional rural way of life, which he wrote about in his first book, Death of a Naturalist(1966). Heaney has won numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (1968), and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize (1975). In 1987 he was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Award for The Haw Lantern.


In 1997 he co-edited with Ted Hughes the companion volume to The Rattle Bag; The School Bag. 1999 saw the publication of his translation of Beowulf, which went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. In 2002, Faber published a selection of his prose, Finders Keepers.. In October 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.